One of Janet Maslin’s Favorite Books of 2018, The New York Times

One of John Warner’s Favorite Books of 2018, Chicago Tribune

Named one of the “Best Civil War Books of 2018” by the Civil War Monitor

“A fascinating and important new historical study.”
—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“A stunning contribution to the historiography of Civil War memory studies.”
—Civil War Times

The stunning, groundbreaking account of “the ways in which our nation has tried to come to grips with its original sin” (Providence Journal)

Hailed by the New York Times as a “fascinating and important new historical study that examines . . . the place where the ways slavery is remembered mattered most,” Denmark Vesey’s Garden “maps competing memories of slavery from abolition to the very recent struggle to rename or remove Confederate symbols across the country” (The New Republic). This timely book reveals the deep roots of present-day controversies and traces them to the capital of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the slaves brought to the United States stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof murdered nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, which was co-founded by Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection in 1822.

Product details

Paperback: 464 pages
Publisher: The New Press; Reprint edition (April 2, 2019)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1620975467
ISBN-13: 978-1620975466
Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.2 x 8.8 inches

DENMARK VESEY'S GARDEN: SLAVERY AND MEMORY IN THE CRADLE OF THE CONFEDERACY